


Nightmare

by starkraving



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Dream Sex, Dubious Consent, Fear of Death, Hurt/Comfort, Mind Manipulation, Multi, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Other, Platonic Cuddling, Platonic Kissing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Power Dynamics, Power Play, Psychological Torture, Rape/Non-con Elements, Sexual Coercion, Sexual Confusion, for now, is having a concern, team cleric
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-07-31 06:15:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20110474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starkraving/pseuds/starkraving
Summary: Uk’otoa hasn’t let go and Fjord’s getting the worst of it now. In the wake of escalating night terrors, Caduceus and Jester do whatever they can to help.





	Nightmare

**Author's Note:**

> See end notes for trigger warning break down. I don't have an excuse for this except that canon is torturing Fjord so that just gives me ammo. Period. I'm a monster. Also, people in my discord chats made way too many tentacle porn jokes.

Fjord wakes to the pull of something cool dragging at the soles of his boots.

It’s a gentle tugging, familiar, instantly recognizable from a childhood spent playing then falling asleep on the beaches of the Menagerie Coast: The tide has come in and the soft lapping edge of the water has begun to wash over his legs. Fjord half groans, half hums somewhere in his chest, pressing his face a little farther into the crook of his arm where it’s pillowed against his bicep. He can hear the low, comforting roar of the ocean. Smell salt and the faint briny rot of kelp washed ashore.

It smells the dying daylight of summer in his hometown and that puts a low, bitter-sweet ache behind his breastbone before Fjord forces himself to wake. 

Blinking, he gets his elbow underneath and lifts his head. Weirdly, no sand clings to his skin or hair. It sifts off with no friction, glowing faintly luminous white beneath his gloved hand. The beaches of the Menagerie Coast were never so pale or so fine. Fjord’s heart lurches then into the back of his throat, his right arm jerking out as he comes awake and immediately smacks a rocky barrier with his wrist.

Fjord is wide awake now.

It’s dark. The sky overhead wheels with constellations he doesn’t know. He comes up on one kneel, pivoting at the waist, trying frantically to find bearings he knows will not be there.

Before him: a sheer obsidian cliff-face rising hundreds of feet toward the sky and stretching endlessly left to right. There are jutting rock formations sticking up from the sand all around him, like he felt asleep in a sea-worn hollow carved by tidepools currents. The water is dragging at his knees now, then his thighs, and Fjord realizes with a sick knotting terror that the water is coming in unnaturally fast.

“No.” His voice sounds muffled in the roar of water. “No, no, I _broke_ the pact. I –”

Something slithers around his knee.

Fjord screams, lunging out of the water to his feet and hitting the cliff wall with his back, facing the rising sea as a wave roars forward and crashes in a swell against the rocks, spraying him to his waist. His fingers dig into the stone. His heart rattles in his throat as he leans there, a shaking horror climbing up his body as the realization settles like a noose around his neck.

In the water, one by one, a dozen glowing yellow eyes peel open beneath the ribbon of sea foam. Two dozen. Three dozen. Too many too count until the black ocean is lit by constellations of snake-eyed amber. Then, they all fix instantaneously on him. Fjord’s entire body lights up from the inside, every nerve going haywire as pure adrenaline terror seizes his entire being and he’s instantly spun around. Grabbing at the cliff wall, he tries to pull himself out of the water.

“No, fuck, no. C’mon. _C’mon_…”

His boots scrape rock, finding purchase but barely, fingernails digging into grit as he clambers in clumsy, panicked lunges up the side of the cliff. The fear is so complete it’s got a fist around his throat, every word coming ragged because he can hear the thunder of the next wave as it breaks against the rocks directly beneath his boots, spraying his back in cool sea water. He grips tighter, pressing himself against the cliff and prays that please, someone, anyone will –

Something lashes around his boot at the ankle.

Fjord yells, kicking against the wall, but the hold is suctioned to the leather and coiling sinuously tight, then dragging, dragging him slowly downward. He strains to pull himself up, arms coiling and burning… but slowly straightening as he’s pulled down, down, down until he’s hanging by his bleeding fingers. He can smell blood and ocean water. The fear is acidic on his tongue, dissolving syllables into reactionary cries as new, coiling lines of muscle slither up the rockface and twine around his knees. 

“Please…” Fjord is whispering it into the rock. “Please, someone…”

And that's when the cliff-face above him _erupts_ with green. He jerks, startled, but hold on as moss races like a spray of paint, flowering virulent against the dark stone, fresh root systems bursting from the rock and crumbling the earth as the cliff erodes in fast forward above him. Ancient roots snake downward, dozens of living lifelines suddenly half an arm’s length away and reaching down toward him. They grow down around his right wrist, spiraling around his hand like the grip of some strange, formless dryad grown from the ocean cliffs. The air smells like torn grass, like sap and blossoms at the end of summer and for a second... Fjord almost believes this won't end like every other nightmare before...

And then the thing gripping his leg yanks downward.

The force of it instantly torques his arm in its socket and Fjord’s tangled grip in the roots starts to slide loose. He hears the bone pop, feels muscle tearing, screams because it fucking _hurts_. And still, the slithering feelers wrap further and further up his legs, latching onto his belt and armor. Relentless. Undying.

He’s yanked again and this time the roots slice into his palm, lacerating his fingers as he tries to hold on.

"Please." Blood runs hot down his wrist. “Melor—”

Fjord is ripped off the cliff.

He feels his fingertips tear open and his forehead scrapes rock, knocking a blue-white starburst behind his right eyeball until he hits the writhing waters below. The shallows have disappeared, replaced by black fathoms and his body slices through the waves, the momentum cutting a long path straight down into deep, deep darkness.

He yells. Water floods his lungs, but he doesn’t drown. It enters him easy as oxygen and the last of the air in his chest erupts in a silvery burst of bubbles that ripple up toward the surface in wobbling disks above him. He’s dragged down, away from the faint shimmer of starlight and Fjord screams again just to hear his own voice shuddering through the infinite, indifferent sea.

He’s alone.

And then the waters around him _unfold_.

Dark tendrils rope themselves around his elbows, his torso, his legs. He feels the friction shred through the fabric of his trousers, ripping his bracers off, tearing buckles away with so much force blood clouds the water. Fjord tears desperately, clawing them; they’re slick as seal skin, ribbed along the bottom with sucking cups that latch painfully to armor, cloth, and flesh.

Fjord waits to die.

The loop around his neck tightens, slithering another coil under his chin, forcing his head back. He feels himself being pulled from every direction, his arms being dragged backward and apart at the elbows behind him, his spine bent back as a massive coil pulls him forward at the belly, the noose yanking upward, his knees being pulled apart until he accepts the insanity-inducing fact that he’s going to be drawn and quartered while alive.

He screams for it to stop, not because he thinks it will, but because he can’t help it.

He’s so _fucking_ scared. 

And then, to his horror, it stops. 

Silence for a moment, and then a word shudders through his brain like a shockwave through water:

** _RETURN_ **

Fjord _weeps_ in rage because he knows he won’t, that he can’t and he’s going to fucking die here again. He shakes his head so much as he can with the garrote around his neck, feels the tentacles wound around his body tighten. Again, a word jags through his mind, vibrating through his brain until his eyes roll back in his skull.

**_RETURN_**.

“No!” Fjord bares his teeth at the darkness. “We have no compact! I won’t do what you—”

His words are cut off then, because something jams itself between his teeth and shoves its writhing, slithering mass into the back of his throat. He immediately bites down, but the blunted heads of his tusks can’t penetrate the skin as his patron forces Fjord’s silence in brutality. He resists, but almost instantly goes slack just to stop the size of it cracking the hinge of his jaw. He still screams though. He screams until he can’t do that because he’s choking, gagging so violently his entire body coils into the reflex.

He can’t move. He’s lashed so tight the most he can do is clench his hands, his nails digging into his palms, praying the single unending thrust fucking ends before he loses his fucking mind. It feels like he’s going have his guts ripped out through his throat and still it just won’t fucking stop.

Fjord starts to black out and only then does it finally end.

It stops, just… resting there for a moment lodged in the aching tract of his throat. His eyes burn, with seawater and tears. He tastes vomit and brine and something oil-slick and sweet. Then he wants to die as the slick length starts to slither backward out of his throat because the relief is so intense the first thing he thinks of is a frantic, _Thank you, thank you, fuck, please don’t do that again, please, I’ll do fucking anything_—

He stifles the thought just before the last of it slides off his tongue, leaving his mouth aching, his throat throbbing. He instantly dry-heaved into the water, but nothing comes up but more of the sea and the ragged, watery sound of his sobbing. There’s slack suddenly in the living restraints, allowing him to pull his arms into himself, doubling his body over into the hurt.

Again the voice:

**_RETURN_**.

“No.” Fjord tries uselessly to pull his limbs in further “_Please_.”

The demigod speaks again, more intently:** _LEARN_**.

“No.” Fjord feels panic, nausea, and hysteria seize every part of him as those sliding limbs start to pull more specifically at the remnants of his armor, his belts, the last of his clothes. “No, don’t! Please! Fucking don’t! I’ll do what you want! I’ll behave! _Stop_!”

His screaming goes unacknowledged as the creature all around him just forces his body into straight lines to pull the leather armor off his torso, tearing his tunic off with it. Skin-to-skin this time, fresh coils wrap his arms, pulling them behind his back and he retches again into the water, his vision blurring as his entire mind tries to shut down to stop being here. The waistband of his trousers gets briefly caught at his hips, tearing as the pulling continues to drag the clothes off his body.

Fjord raises his head, looking upward toward the surface he can no longer see.

“Wake up.” He doesn’t know who he's pleading with. “Wake up. Wake up, please, wake up.”

The loop of his belt pulls at last over his thighs and suddenly he’s completely naked in the water. Not for the first time, but this time a great yellow slit cracks open from fathoms beneath, a line of amber light cutting through the water and illuminating Fjord’s bare legs from below. He looks down in time to watch the eye yawn open, the massive vertical pupil narrowing within the golden iris as it focuses entirely on him.

Fjord feels the first slither of friction slide between his legs, the coil around his right thigh winding further upward until the blunt, nudging tip runs blindly across the join of his inner leg to his groin. He gags again, trying immediately to pull his legs shut. Instead, the lines of dark sinew around his knees begins to tighten and _pull_, spreading him open and winding his legs. He can’t move. He can’t wake up. He can’t fucking wake up.

“Don’t.” Fjord is shaking so hard, his teeth chatter a little when he speaks. “Don’t. I’ll obey. I’ll obey, I fucking swear.”

His head is pulled back, forcing his eyes up to surface.

“No, no—”

He chokes, his spine going rigid as slick heat slides up across his testicles and along the length of his cock, half hard already with the adrenaline and fear. His eyes sting unbearably, his mouth opening on a scream that doesn’t come. He jerks, hips bucking as the slick, slithering friction wraps and tightens around him sliding up and down in a spiral along the shaft until all the blood rushes toward his belly and he’s just _screaming_.

A second tentacle slides around the swell of his balls, a third tracing the split of his ass. Where they touch, he’s left slick and hot, the skin aching with every heartbeat. His cock feels heavy between his thighs, a single throbbing nerve wired all the way to the back of his fucking throat until he can’t form any words that aren’t low, animal vowel sounds driven out of him with every slide.

He twitches, crying out and for the first time, it’s not… it’s not fear.

** _RETURN._ **

“No!” Fjord screams. “No! STOP!”

Fjord thrashes, but he’s lashed so tight the only thing he can move is his hips, bucking unintentionally deeper into another head-splittingly rut of pleasure. He bursts into a fit of yelling, but the creature controlling him just spreads his legs wider, until the muscles strain along his inner thighs and his face is hot, his breathing labored and frantic.

The slick head of the third appendage is pressed undeniably against his asshole, pushing a slow, finger’s width of heat up inside of him inch by agonizing inch. It’s slow insistent work, easing him open in shallow but steady penetrations.

His insides ache, pulsing unnaturally hot. He dissociates, disconnecting in ugly starts and stops, snapping back to himself at random, uncontrollable intervals. He means to fight it, even if it tears him apart, but when the final, implacable thrust finally comes, he just… he can’t. He goes limp. It _hurts_. The hurt is familiar. It stretches him wide, impaling him, filling him completely and Fjord just… he grits his teeth and swallows the insane screaming that comes instinctive to him. He takes it until it’s done and he’s hanging there, trying not to whine like a fucked animal. He feels a shift deep inside, a slight flex of muscle pressing up into him and his walls instantly clench and slide around the mass inside him, a bolt of pleasure jolting through his gut and spine.

He forgets where he is as the thrusting starts.

The pain disappears, melting into a sudden nerve-static pressure. It feels so fucking _good_ he can’t think straight. He feels drugged, point of fact, drunk and aching inside and out. The tentacle lodged deeply inside him pulls briefly out then slides easily back inside him, slamming generously into the knot of his prostate over and over and over until Fjord is limp, unresisting in the hold of his patron. He spreads his thighs, bucks obediently into the sucking grip around his cock. .

He’s moaning and it’s obscene, keening, and bestial.

He never wants it to stop, he just wants to fucking exists here like this, completely fucking bound and blameless and locked in an eternal fucking worship of the god as it acts relentlessly upon and inside him. He’s possessed entirely. Fjord feels the snaking press of tendrils at his lips and he opens his mouth for them, flattens his tongue, moaning as his jaw is forced wide and he takes in a second sinuous length.

His throat is fucked then as well, gentle, coaxing until Fjord corrects himself, is slack-jawed, hollow-cheeked, and drooling slightly as he takes it. His lips feel swollen and aching. He feels that slither down his throat, his gag reflex clutching around the organ inside him and his cock throbs, running agonizingly hot with seed. Another coaxing thrust pushes deeper into his throat, his eyes fluttering half-closed in pleasure as his cock again twitches, eager at the new penetration.

**_REWARD_**.

Fjord climaxes immediately, his cock straining in the slithering grip of his patron, his eyes rolling back in his skull. He comes and he comes, and it seems like it’s going to go on forever, his groin spasming uncontrollably as wave after wave washes along every nerve in his shaking body. His skin feels tight, throbbing against his bones. His belly hot and full. Finally, when a giddy dizziness begins to take him, the sensation begins to fade.

But he’s still hard.

His cock throbs – clutched hot still in the grip of his god and moan gratefully as it all begins again. Fjord drifts then. He’s mindless then, a thing that exists to be fucked until there is nothing but the pleasure and the yellow glow of the eye beneath him.

Eventually, Fjord’s mouth is given back to him, his tongue slick with the residue from his patron as the word forms as warm, pulsing shivering inside his brain.

**_RETURN_**.

“Yes.” The word is a moan as he’s lovingly impaled, his thighs trembling with the pleasure. “Anything… I’ll do… _anything_…”

**_RETURN_**.

Fjord screams, his voice stuttering from his throat as another thrust displaces the water between the warlock’s thighs, his cock heavy and erect. He feels his heartbeat suddenly in his chest, a dull pulse of golden light beneath his ribs.

** _RETURN._ **

“I will. I… I’ll do it.” He receives another thrust in reward, so deep he’s slurring, “I’ll be good. I’ll be so good…” He feels something probing gently at the edge of his straining hole. “Please—”

Fjord’s head snaps back, his entire body going hot, then numb as a second slimmer organ spirals up inside of him, deeper and deeper until he’s literally twitching all over, nerves sending unstoppable jolts through every part of him. The new member settles deep and as Fjord arches and moans as it presses so precisely and exquisitely into his prostate his cock instantly spasms with orgasm. He can’t even cry out, his throat locked in a soundless keen, his toes curling, his entire lower body slaved to the sensation.

A word congeals itself inside his mind, clear and burning:

**_WORSHIP_**.

Fjord opens his mouth to do exactly that, to declare himself body and soul for The Great Leviathan within him, to ask forgiveness for his defiance, to beg for another binding pact that will lash him forever to –

And it’s exactly that moment when he feels a hand grab his shoulder, and Caduceus Clay say furiously, “_Fjord_! _Wake up_ _NOW_!”

And Fjord wakes up.

He’s lying on his back in an unfamiliar bed, an unfamiliar rough-hewn ceiling striped in moonlight overhead, and above him hovers the familiar and deeply worried firbolg features of Caduceus. The cleric is disheveled and pale, the strange pink color in his eyes luminous in the shadows. He’s got two hands on Fjord’s shoulders rather like he’s been shaking him with some violence for an extended period of time.

“Fjord, talk to me.”

Fjord rolls over and vomits sea water and vicious fluid over the side of his bed onto the floor.

“Well, okay,” Caduceus says.

Fjord retches, his spine coiling up and Cad quickly puts one hand on his shoulder to steady him and another pressing into the small of his back. Fjord can’t stop retching, so he just keeps going until he’ dry heaving, his eyes watering, saliva burning on his tongue.

“Fjord?”

He chokes on a sob.

“Hey. It’s alright. Just let it out.”

Fjord doesn’t say anything, just sits back in the bed, dragging his hands back through the long part of his hair, his head pulled down against his knees. He starts hyperventilating.

“Fjord, it was a dream. You’re okay now.”

His voice shudders as the words finally come: “What did I do?”

“Nothing. It was a dream.”

“It wasn’t just a dream.” Fjord covers his mouth with both hands, feels the slick mucus texture on his tongue. “I did that.” He drops his hand against his chest, his fingers digging into the tunic over his heart. “I have to— I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” There’s a dull pain as his nails start to find purchase, the relief as it draws blood. “I can’t take—"

Caduceus grabs Fjord with two hands, one on either side of his skull and pulls his face up so they’re eye to eye. Then he says, voice shivering with an arcane pressure, “_Calm down_,” and Fjord lets the enchantment slide into him and calm the flayed part of his brain that’s telling him to claw his own fucking eyes out. He still feels the impulse, but distantly, like it can wait until later.

He smiles at Caduceus. “That’s better,” he says, a little foggy.

“I just used a spell on you, Fjord. I apologize, but I think you were going to do something bad.”

“I was.” He grins warmly at the very worried expression cleaving Caduceus’ usually unflappable calm. “Youuu were right. The link isn’t broken.” He turns his face against Cad’s palm, like a cat pushing its face against someone’s body. He mumbles, “It found me. He found me again, got in my head, Cad, made it feel really fucking good.”

“So it used magic to compel you to do things. You know you’re not responsible for anything you do under the influence of magic, right?”

“Wasn’t magic. It was me.”

“No. You’re here in your bed. You never left.”

“I can taste it.” The words strain as he says them. “I can still… It’s in me, Cad. I let it back in, I’m—”

Caduceus slides his hands down a little, hooks his thumbs up under Fjord’s jaw and tilts his face up, then very calmly, clinically almost, leans down presses his mouth against Fjord’s. There’s a part of Fjord that is very far away right now that kind of flutters a bit when this happens, but at the moment he just kind of lets it happen, relaxing, letting his mouth fall open a little though Caduceus doesn’t push it.

He breaks the contact gently and leans his forehead against Fjord’s.

“I don’t taste anything,” he murmurs. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

Fjord shudders. “It made me want to belong to it again, Cad."

“You never,” Caduceus interrupts, “belonged to that thing, Fjord.” The cleric’s eyes are pale, eerie in the half light. “It’s desperation to pull you back shows its hand. Do you believe – Ah. _No_.” Cad turns his head away as Fjord leans forward suddenly, his lips pressing into the corner of Caduceus’ mouth before the cleric gently pulls back. “Sorry. I was just trying to snap you out of it. Don’t do that. You’re not okay right now.”

“C-can you get Jester?” Fjord breathes, his head falling against Cad’s shoulder. “I need to… talk to…” He swallows. “She’ll know what I am. She can always tell…”

“Okay. Just breathe for a minute. I’ll get her for you.”

“Mmm,” Fjord mumbles into Cad’s shirt.

Caduceus carefully cradles the back of his head, his palm smoothing across the shaved part of Fjord’s hair at the back of his skull. With his other hand, he does the somatic component to a Sending spell.

He murmurs into the air, “Jester, it’s Caduceus. Please be discreet about this. Fjord isn’t feeling well. Can you come into our room?” A pause, then, “I think it’s Uk’atoa.”

About thirty seconds later, the door creaks and a slender blue-complexioned teifling woman in a sleeping tunic slips soundlessly into the room with a stealth that might be magically enhanced. Her dark blue hair shimmers black in the half-light, her eyes white all the way around as she pads across the floor. Her weight dips the mattress behind Fjord, pressing a hand to the back of his neck and another to the side of his ribs, like she’s trying to indirectly feel his heartbeat through his shirt.

“Fjord?”

“He’s under a spell,” Caduceus whispers. “I used Calm Emotions. I’m sorry, he seemed in a really bad way. I’m not sure…” A beat. “When I woke up, he was in a trance. I almost couldn’t bring him out of it.”

Jester leans her head against Fjord’s back, her ear pressed to the base of his neck as her arms drop and loop around his chest from behind. She squeezes and the pressure of her arms around his ribs send a dull jolt of panic, suppressed and distant, through him as her touch echoes the roping grasp from the dreamscape.

“Fjord? It’s me, are you okay?”

“I’m… I’m honestly not sure, Jester.”

“Fjord, it’s okay, you know? You’re safe now, we got you.” Jester perches her chin on his shoulder. He can hear the slight tremble in her voice. “You’re okay. You’re right here.”

“I mean I _can’t_ tell. Caduceus put a spell on me.”

“Oh… right. You want him to turn it off?”

A long pause. “I don’t know.”

Jester’s breathe huffs anxiously. “Okay. We don’t… we don’t have to. Caduceus?”

“It’s going to fade.” Cad shakes his head, the long part of his hair dusting Fjord’s shoulder as he murmurs, “I can recast it, but it’s not… you use it in a moment to stop yourself from doing something or force yourself to do something. We can’t muffle it forever.”

Jester thinks on that… then loops one of her arms up around Fjord’s inner elbow, gently pinning the limb against his ribs and locking her wrist into her other palm. She shifts forward so she’s seated behind him, her knees crooked up against his ribs, making a small blue Jester-shaped backpack of herself. She nods, her chin digging into Fjord’ shoulder, near his neck.

“You’re okay,” she says, but like she’s trying to convince herself. “It’ll be okay. We’re got you.”

“It’s fading,” Caduceus warns.

Fjord feels it, like a fog rolling back in his mind, the vague discomfort and anxiety sharpening suddenly, refining again into razor sharp lines, then razor sharp pain. His breathing quickens. Jester’s grip around him goes tight and she murmurs something nonsensical against his jaw, forcibly holding him still. Caduceus holds his face down against his shoulder, blinding him and likewise holding him still, restrained by two close-pressed cleric bodies.

They kind of sit on him like that until the violent, desperate impulse to just… _claw_ something red and ugly out of his own throat fades away. He’s left panting, choking slightly on his own breathing.

“You’re okay,” Caduceus rumbles, low in his chest. One hand is on Fjord’s head, the other hand on his bicep, holding his arm down where he instinctively grabbed at Caduceus’ tunic “C’mon, just breathe. Breathe through it.” He pauses, listening to the shuddering breath Fjord manages. “You’re not alone. You’re safe. Just breathe.”

Fjord is mortified but his chest contracts in a raw, clutching sob.

Jester hugs him tighter. She’s humming, a weird little tune. He recognizes it. It was the one she’d try to sing back in the sour nest, when he’d do his goddamnest to draw all the violence from her to him (to very limited success) and the beating left him a blood-soaked, shivering thing on the floor. A pulse of cool peppermint-y chill spreads through his ribs from her hands, and instinctive healing magic though there’s no wound to cure.

“You’re okay,” she insists. “Fuck Uk’otoa. I’ll find it and stomp its head in. I have a _real_ god on my side and it’s just a dumb snake and it can’t have you.” She hugs tighter. “We’ve got you.” Her voice is doing that high strained thing it does when she’s anxious or fighting down tears. “You’re totally fine. You’re okay.”

Cad bends his head down, so he’s speaking against the top of Fjord’s head.

“I woke up because the Wild Mother woke me. To help you.”

Fjord bites down another jag of sobbing because it’s too fucking embarrassing to be his weak right now, but Caduceus ignores it. Just goes on, steady:

“She’s watching you. That’s something, Fjord, it really is.”

“I wasn’t strong enough—”

“That’s not what happened. You were falling and she tried to catch you. It had nothing to do with your strength. Stop trying to take responsibility here. This too big to be your fault, Fjord. Sorry. It just is.”

“I’ll be… I just need to catch my breath.” Fjord tries to force a smile, however shaky, to coerce a brave cheer into his tone. “I’m fine.”

“I’d be shocked,” says Caduceus, his hand pressing a little harder against the back of Fjord’s skull. “I’d be floored if you were fine. And point of fact, you don’t _have_ to be fine ever. Some things are scars. There’s _nothing_ wrong with you if you’re not okay. Do whatever you need to.”

Fjord can’t maintain the false smile and slides away unnoticed against Cad’s shoulder. He nods after a while.

Caduceus waits, the hand on Fjord’s arm squeezing gently.

“Hey, this is a moment,” he says. “It feels insurmountable, but I promise you, the version of you that’s waiting to be is going to put moments like this beneath his heel. It’s a step toward what you’re supposed to be.” Caduceus lowers his voice a little, murmuring, “You have to endure long enough to be that man. Can you try to do that?”

Fjord squeezes his eyes shut. “Yes.”

And Jester adds, “Also, I’m gonna kill that guy. Uk’atoa is _dead_.”

“Welll,” says Caduceus. “We can put that on the list.”

“Kill. Him,” seethes Jester.

“Sure. We’ll work on it.”

Jester rubs her face in Fjord’s tunic. He can feel warm wet spots turning cold.

“I’m declaring war,” she mumbles. Her nails dig a little through the fabric. “I’m gonna fuckin’ get him.”

“I think you killed those fire bugs things and now you’re getting ambitious,” says Caduceus patiently.

“I toooottally fucking killed those things I will fight a big snake!”

“It’s a demi-god.”

“Whatever!”

Neither Caduceus nor Jester relinquish their cleric circle around Fjord while they argue amiably over the top of his head about the logistical challenges of stopping a sea serpent pseudo-god to death as a regular-sized mammoth. It’s weirdly comforting. They talk around him, until the tension starts to wind out of his limbs a bit and after a while, unnoticed by himself, he ends up laying on his back with his head in Jester’s lap. He has no recollection of being positioned this way, but Caduceus is seated on the bed next to him and he has on hand on Fjord’s chest.

They’re discussing cupcakes.

“What are you doing?” Fjord asks eventually.

“Talking,” says Caduceus.

“You don’t have to—”

“We’re not going anywhere, Fjord. Shut up,” says Jester. It feels like she’s putting things in his hair.

“I’m okay.”

“With respect,” says Caduceus, “you’re an excellent liar, Fjord, but you’re not okay.”

“I’m not… I’m not lying, Caduceus.” He smiles. “Honestly.”

“Fjord. Frankly, you’re freaking me out.”

He blinks. “What am I…?”

“People handle terrible things differently. That’s fine. If people want to ignore a thing, sometimes that’s necessary.” Caduceus’ fingers, resting spread over Fjord’s heart, kind of shift a little. “_You_ started clawing your own chest bloody over whatever you saw. So, until I’m confident something isn’t influencing you, we’re keeping a watch.”

“You can’t do that for me,” Fjord murmurs. He’s dropped any pretense of a conversational smile. “If I’m not strong enough… I can’t… I just can’t. You’ll have to leave me behind for my own safety.”

“Not really true,” Caduceus says, bland as butter and infuriatingly reasonable. “Leaving you alone to get stalked by an interdimensional world snake doesn’t seem like it’s for your safety. Maybe think that through a second time.”

“You can’t protect me forever.”

“Well, no. But since we’re planning to just do it until we change our circumstances, that’s all good.”

“The others are going—”

“Stop it!” Jester hisses it, her words rushing out in furious squeak. “We already told you: We’re not going to ditch you just because you’re not magic or _whatever_ and we’re super not going to ditch you while a freaking god monster is sleep stalking you, Fjord. _Whatdoyouthinkwe’reassholes_?” She gets really high and fast at the end there and takes a breath. Her next question has a tiny wobble in it. “Do you really think_ I_ would leave you?”

Fjord swallows.

“Jes…”

“What did you dream that was so _bad_?”

Fjord closes his eyes.

“You don’t have to tell me! It’s okay. I’m just kind of freaked out right now. This is a lot worse than it’s ever been, you know? I like kinda knew you were maybe keeping secrets about whatever you were dreaming and stuff, but it was just dreams and this feels super real now and… and I’m…”

She says nothing for a moment.

“I don’t want to scare you,” Fjord whispers.

There’s a pause, a long one. He can feel Jester staring at the top of his head for a good ten seconds.

Then:

“In the Sour Nest, you know what the worse part was?” She says it so easily, invoking the event she hasn’t spoken about literally since it happened. “It wasn’t when they made me watch what they did, it was when they took you out of the room and I couldn’t see you anymore. Because I could hear them and I—” she sucks a shuddering breath— “You don’t have to tell me… but don’t keep secrets to protect me, cuz imagining is worse, Fjord. I have a good imagination. So…”

Fjord opens his mouth, meaning to bullshit something, but before he can say a damn thing, he feels the word tremble on his tongue, his jaw seized by the involuntary beginnings of a sob and his bites down on it. It’s a long time until he manages to try again.

“It fucking hurts me.”

He feels liquid heat slide from the corner of his eyes and down his temple toward the bed. He draws a shaking breath, gives up on keeping the ragged edges from his words.

“It’s worse now.”

“How?”

“It’s in my head and it makes me… it makes me think things and feel things and I can’t keep it separated. It’s blurring together and I… I’m terrified it’s going to turn me into someone else.”

“It won’t,” Jester whispers.

“But I _know_ it can,” Fjord says, agonized. “That’s the worst part I know if this goes on long enough, I’ll— I turn into whatever others want me to be. I’ll start to—” Fjord can’t say it. “I’m fucking scared, Jester.”

She has her hand on his forehead now, the other pressed to his cheek. She’s bent over him, he knows because he can feel her hair brushing his face.

“I want you to be you.” She’s so close, her breath is cool against his forehead. “Can you be that instead?”

“I’m trying.”

“I want you to be you more than it wants you to be a warlock. Okay? I win.”

Fjord can’t help it. He kind of laughs, even though it makes his throat hurt to do it. “Please, kick its ass, Jes.”

“You got it,” she whispers, but he hears her sniffle a little. “Fjord?”

He doesn’t say anything, but he smells the slightly old jasmine smell in her hair suddenly, the brush of the longer parts of it suddenly against his cheek, the warmth of her breath as she bends down and kisses his forehead. He’s not sure, but it feels like she turns the contact into the component of a healing spell because a strange coolness seeps into him from where she touches him, filling his head with a calming sense of… blue.

“It can’t have you.” She whispers it against his hair. “You’re ours. Okay?”

“Okay.”

* * *

Fjord wakes up.

This time, it’s to the gentle murmur of conversation at the door across the room, where Caduceus is saying something like, “Yeeeah, I asked Jester to help me with a clerical component.” More murmurs. “No. We kept Fjord up with it. It’s my fault. Gonna give them another half an hour.” There’s a mutter of what sounds like Beauregard asking about breakfast. “That would be nice, actually. If they have it.”

Fjord lifts his head. There’s a displeased grumble when he does it. He looks over his shoulder. Jester is kind of backpacked along his spine on arm draped over his ribs. She appears to be sleeping still because she’s snoring delicately against the back of his neck. He lies back down so he doesn’t disturb her and peers down at the blankets where her hand is laid, her fingers curled on the sheets near his elbow. He’s not sure why that, Jester’s hand relaxing on a blanket, puts a kind of raw feeling in his gut.

Some strange place between relief and guilt for being relieved, but he does.

“F’ve more minutes,” Jester mumbles.

Across the room, Caduceus is getting out a small pouch of dried tea leaves and frowning at it and Fjord knows, though it was never discussed, that nothing that happened in this room last night will ever be repeated to anyone by anyone except himself. It’s a simple thing, but the knowing of it allows him to breath in a way he hadn’t realized he was holding on to.

Fjord closes his eyes.

He breathes out.

**Author's Note:**

> TW: Straight up dream torture of the sexual variety. Bondage, restraint, forced penetration both oral and anal, forced orgasm. The dreamscape makes some parts of this feel more like a rape fantasy than straight up rape, but that's pretty much just reality being bent for maximum head fuckery. 
> 
> NOTES: Fjord played chicken with a demi-god and didn't seem to give a shit about getting crushed, drowned, or killed in the dream state, so a switch in tactics seems called for. I also just have feelings about Cad and Jester forming a protective circle around their ex-warlock teammate when he finally flips out. As always, comments and feedback are fab and keep the wheels spinning.


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